U.S. EPA Seeks More Project XL Input
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced an initiative aimed at finding innovative ways to improve measures used to protect public health and environmental quality. In a June 23 Federal Register (FR) notice, the EPA made specific suggestions and called for more companies, industrial sectors, communities, federal facilities, the states and other potential sponsors to propose projects under the Agency's Project XL program.
This pilot program was announced some time ago by President Clinton and stands for "eXcellence and Leadership." Under Project XL, the EPA offers flexibility in its regulations, policies, procedures, and guidance, as well as other benefits to encourage development and testing of "cleaner, cheaper, and smarter" ways to protect public health and the environment.
Two key conditions for such pilot projects are:
- That they produce better environmental results
- That they involve representatives of the public in the project.
While the FR notice provides a number of ideas for possible XL projects, the suggested themes in no way preclude any other ideas to be tested. The themes in the notice include testing new strategies, tools, and technologies in areas such as waste reduction, Superfund cleanup, air and water pollution control, multi-media pollution prevention and ecosystem protection.
At present seven pilot projects are being implemented and twenty more are in development. The current projects are said to demonstrate that alternative regulatory strategies can greatly increase environmental protection while producing substantial cost savings, greater operational flexibility, better stakeholder relationships, and the ability to adapt processes and products more quickly to changes in consumer demand.
In a complementary FR notice, also published on June 23, the EPA issued a specific and detailed request for Project XL proposals from publicly owned wastewater treatment works (POTWs). Proposals should explain how a POTW would change the implementation of its local pretreatment program if it were to focus more on environmental performance measures rather than existing programmatic measures of performance.
Both of these FR notices and other materials are available on the Internet at: http://www.epa.gov/ProjectXL and through Fax-on-demand at 202-260-8590.
In a related action aimed at supporting stakeholder involvement under Project XL, the Institute for Conservation Leadership (ICL) recently announced that it can now accept applications for technical assistance to stakeholder groups involved in XL project negotiations, implementation or evaluations. Funding up to $25,000 per project is available to help meet very specific technical assistance needs of the entire group. ICL is providing this assistance under a cooperative agreement with the EPA. For more information, contact Peter Lane at ICL, 301-270-2900.